


De-mystifying the Production of Eggs

by ghost_lingering



Category: The Mysterious Production of Eggs (Album)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the Warwicks want is for the chickens to be able to produce more eggs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	De-mystifying the Production of Eggs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hikaru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaru/gifts).



> I'd never written a fic based on a song / album before so I hope this is sort of what you were looking for! Though I feel like I should apologize because it's really based on what *I* think of every time I listen to this album, which is: what *is* the Mysterious Production of Eggs? So. This is total crack. About eggs.
> 
> Things you should know: besides being an Andrew Bird song, [Sovay is also the name of an English ballad](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkpujKDSTTo) about a woman who becomes a highway robber. It's not essential knowledge for reading the fic, but I think it's pretty awesome / hilarious. Finally, this isn't based on any actual place — the geography belongs to some other world.

The town — and it wasn't even a town really, just a gathering of people who all lived in the same place — was six miles north of South Platte, an unincorporated collection of broken buildings and cars called Sovay. No one outside of a twenty mile radius or the culinary world would have even heard of it, except that it was also — at 2.37 miles — the town closest to the (terribly uninhabited) border of the country that their country was fighting a war with.

The roads were too narrow and unkempt to drive a fleet of army vehicles on — and too far away from the actual fighting and cities and people other troops and _war_ , besides — but there was a small garrison camped outside the town who patrolled the border and who trampled through the back of Wilson Warwick's backyard when they did drills.

Wilson Warwick was, to say the least, not thrilled.

Before the war, before his parents died, before Sovay shrunk from two hundred people to less than twenty, before the town's name was Sovay, it was known — in _some_ circles — for its larger than average sized (and rather ridiculously colored) wild chickens, who laid the largest and most delicious eggs known to mankind.

There were never very many of them, the chickens, and in that mad rush of two hundred people slurping the eggs raw (because they were just that delicious) the population never recovered. But, though most people who came to Sovay were there searching for a culinary high, the Warwick family came for science. Wilson's grandmother, Wilma Warwick, lead the charge, taking her husband (Wardell Warwick, who took his wife's maiden name for his married one) and her daughter (Wendy Warwick) up the steep sloping dirt road, toting their bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks behind them. When Wilma (and Wardell and Wendy) arrived in the then-nameless Sovay, it was to a population of chickens who weren't able to hatch their eggs. They collected as many chickens as they could find and set about working to fix the population, to regrow the chickens to their once slightly larger numbers.

If it wasn't for the Warwicks the larger than average sized (and rather ridiculously colored) wild chickens would have been totally wiped out. As it was, just like the population of Sovay went from two hundred egg-crazed foodies to less than twenty, the wild chickens went from the dominate (and possibly only) species in the area surrounding Sovay to living just in Wilson Warwick's backyard.

Which brings back the conundrum with the war and border and the garrison and the drills: the chickens were being disturbed and Wilson wouldn't stand for it any longer. He was going to take this matter to the highest of all authorities. He was going to take it to the town council.

The town council consisted of five people who met every Sunday evening to discuss important town events while no one — including most of the members of the council — listened. At nineteen, Yejide was the youngest, and she spent the meetings translating her father's book of recipes from Yoruba into binary — a string of ones and zeroes only she could read. Edna was in her sixties, and she couldn't hear or see or walk, but she could smell fresh herbs at 100 paces. Everyone in Sovay agreed: if you ate a meal Edna cooked, you could never go back. She spent most of the meetings dictating into her voice recorder the cookbook she'd been working on her entire life: her treatise on the delicate use of spice in the kitchen. Shinju and Kalev were lovers, though not of each other. They were lovers of emulsified sauces: hollandaise, mayonnaise, salad dressing. They were true food scientists and while they rarely got along outside of the kitchen, inside they kitchen they worked together as if they could read each others' minds. And old Mr. Reynolds, at eighty-eight, was an artist, looking into alternative foods as a way to prolong life. He spent most of the meeting chewing on his dentures and doodling comics in his sketch book — fields of 400 foot industrial wind turbines and a scraggly Don Quixote with a B-17 taking them on — while humming Ride of the Valkyries.

They were an odd, mismatched town council. They disagreed about the war, about the speed limit on the dirt roads, and about the proper way to prepare an egg, but they did agree on one thing, and that thing was the Warwicks. The Warwicks were, to put it mildly, persona non grata in Sovay. The townspeople blamed the Warwicks (erroneously) for the dearth of wild chicken eggs, and in a town built around the abundance of said eggs, the dearth was the death knoll for the town. When the Wilma Warwick came, she saw the writing on the wall for the larger than average sized (and rather ridiculously colored) wild chickens and, as such, went about collecting them and quarantining them in her own yard, allowing them to breed and lay eggs in peace. Wardell Warwick didn't have the science learning his wife did so he went about helping in his own way: scaring off the culinary townspeople the only way he knew how — with guns. To Wilma's dismay, Wendy took after her father, though in her mother's eyes her crack shot didn't make up for how often she cracked their beakers.

So. As the last remaining Warwick, Wilson boure the brunt of the town's anger. They, to put it bluntly, hated him. If eggs weren't in such precious supply in Sovay, Wilson would have been hit by all the rotten ones.

So it was with great bravery and not an inconsequential amount of trepidation that Wilson entered the large, dilapidated kitchen arena that had been built in the heyday of the egg hunt. There were thirteen stoves, each carted carefully up the roads using oxen, and ten large sinks, deep enough for the stock pots. All of the counters doubled as cutting boards and there was enough surface area for seven restaurants. All of the crockery was top of the line and the cutlery was imported from across two and a half oceans.

Wilson Warwick had never felt so out of place in his life. He could barely boil water for tea, and he had a weak stomach besides.

When he entered it was to find the five members of the town council sitting around the closest counter, arguing the finer points of ginger and it's application in savory dishes. The door slammed shut behind Wilson and he gulped as five heads all swung to look at him and five sets of eyes narrowed into glares.

"What are _you_ doing here?" Kalev asked, as Shinju scrunched up her nose like she was smelling milk that had gone sour.

Wilson had never been a confrontational child, and, having grown up in a town that hated him, he wasn't very good with people. Still. He was here for a purpose. He took in a deep breath and crossed his fingers hoping that he wouldn't stutter and said, "I would like to request your help."

The entire council stared at him. He stared back. Sweat began to run down the back of his neck. He counted to ten, telling himself that if they hadn't said anything by then he would continue with his pitch. But then eleven and twelve and thirteen passed and he didn't speak. He was afraid of being the first to break the silence.

"You need our help?" Mr. Reynolds asked and Wilson nodded.

"Why would you need our help?" Edna asked, as Yejide's jaw, quite literally, dropped.

"Well," he started, quaking under their collective stares, "It's about the garrison. They're upsetting the chickens."

There was a general mutter of confusion amongst the council, and some mumbling.

"The garrison," Yejide finally said, "is nice enough to give us all the chickens you haven't stolen. The garrison gives us eggs. We like the garrison."

The council all nodded, except for Edna. "Well, they haven't given us any chickens yet," she said, "They've said the only chickens they've seen are with Warwick here."

"But they promised us they would give us chickens and their eggs," Kalev corrected, "If they were to find any."

"But they haven't yet," Edna said.

"Are they keeping them for themselves, you think?" Mr. Reynolds asked and everyone turned to glare at him.

"Well they wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for the Warwicks," Shinju said and everyone nodded and looked at Wilson.

He gulped.

It was, indeed, true that the war wouldn't have started if it hadn't been for the Warwicks — Wendy Warwick to be exact. When she hadn't followed her mother's footsteps and became a crack shot instead, she found her career options to be limited. She moonlighted as a highway robber, since that was the only way the universally despised Warwicks would be able to eat.

But when she accidentally crossed the border and robbed a caravan carrying the second best chef of the now mostly ornamental royal family of the neighboring country, well. That was a good enough excuse to start a war for both countries. Even if the second best chef went AWOL, falling in love with both Wendy and the eggs of Sovay. And, if, he turned out in later years to be a backstabbing turncoat when he left Wendy pregnant and three hens and a cock short of a whole flock, well. When it came to everything but science and shooting things, the Warwicks were unlucky.

But the second best chef left one thing behind (besides his child): a recipe posted in the middle of the town. A torte with a rich egg sauce that he had entitled "Sovay". It was then that the town took on it's name, and yet another obsession: get enough eggs (five) to make the recipe and try it, because, everyone agreed, it looked like it might be the best thing that any of them had ever had the pleasure to dream of tasting.

The naming of Sovay was also the creation of the town council: in a town obsessed with cooking, what better than to vote the best chefs and connoisseurs to be your leaders. And so, as Wilson stood before them while they discussed the various intricacies of the garrison and the probability of getting eggs from them, he laid all his remaining (if metaphorical) cards on the table: he set down a basket of the five most perfect and beautiful chicken eggs his chickens had produced, and he waited until the council caught on:

"Oh," breathed Yejide, spotting them first.

"Oh," sighed Edna, holding a hand over her heart.

"Oh" echoed Kalev and Shinju together, reaching over to hold each others hands.

"Oh my lord," said Mr. Reynolds, "You're actually giving us eggs."

Wilson picked up the basket from the table and looked at each of the members of the town council in turn.

"The chicken population is slowly rebounding," Wilson Warwick said, "And I will give you these eggs — and more within a reasonable set of limits to ensure that the population can withstand the rate of consumption — if you vote to move the garrison to the other side of town, away from the chickens and their eggs."

The council shifted in their seats.

"Please?" he continued.

"You drive a hard bargain," Mr. Reynolds said, "How can we be sure to trust you?"

"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," Kalev said.

"That's right," said Edna, "We have to keep an eye on you to make sure that you're holding up your end of the bargain."

"Perhaps," said Yejide, "We could put him on the town council. That way we would be able to hold him accountable."

"Oh," said Wilson, nonplussed, "Anything you want, so long as the garrison gets moved."

Which is how Wilson Warwick ended up as the first mayor of Sovay, and how the town finally got to try the torte with egg sauce at last. And while the war raged on, and the culinary aficionados outside of Sovay were purposefully kept in the dark about the now (not abundant but certainly not uncommon) supply of eggs, Sovay, at least, had made a kind of peace with themselves and the land: it was with great pleasure that last June the town council was able to officially proclaim that the larger than average sized (and rather ridiculously colored) wild chickens have, again, been released to the wild and their numbers, under the care of Wilson Warwick, have started to grow.


End file.
